This is going to sound harsh, but sometimes artists, of any kind, shouldn’t release their work into the public realm until they’ve successfully graduated from the apprentice stage. Think of painters 150 years ago; I’m sure Van Gogh had to toil in anonymity before his talent was recognized. Well, this is exactly how I occasionally feel about the overpopulated community of electronic artists being released, particularly Slow Motion’s newest LP Summer Of My Youth. It is decidedly unfortunate, because the tragic romantic in me fell in love with the title before I even listened to the album. There were visions of Boards Of Canada’s melancholy.

Much to my dismay, the only genetic traces of BOC appeared in small bites of sound. Realistically, this group is, at best, the spazzy, carefree little brother of BOC. There is a determined lack of continuity and groove in the songs. For example, “Marbles” rolls around like a bunch of…well, let’s just say it’s aptly titled, but that the instrumentation bounces back and forth and off the walls and each other. Can we get a dose of thorazine for this song? “A Digital Anthem” proceeds to get my hopes up with a dark and ominous start to the rhythm, all dirty, dusty drum sounds, but then crushes me with an immediate jump into sunny optimism at the 39 second mark. Exasperating, to say the least, because I always try so hard to listen with an open ear and find something I like, but 39 seconds just isn’t doin’ it for me.
   
Even my favorite track isn’t something I want to delve in to repeat listens on. “Yang Yin (Where Is My Beauty Now?)” employs a fantastic guitar loop hailing from the Portishead/Ennio Morricone reverb gene pool. The kind of guitar timbre that pokes you into nervous anticipation of a pissed off Clint Eastwood rounding every corner with a smoking hot six-shooter in his leathery hand. Unfortunately, again, my best hopes are squashed by the breathy, wimpy specter of Trent Reznor vocals spraying audio offal on top of what manages to be a solid eletro beat. Then the vox-box singing on “Smoking In Toilets” just makes me want to torture myself with Zapp and Roger albums.

In summation, I have a question for you, my dear reader. Do you remember those cheesedogs from the ‘80’s where the cheese was actually inside the dog?? Well, that is my metaphor for how I feel about this record; in the summer of my youth, those cheesedogs were a good idea, but I’m an adult now and learned that those things will rot your insides.

-Gabriel Bogart